Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Transcript (PDF)

The 19th Century
Presentation 4 of 13

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
The New Art Form of the Romantic Cosmic Knight
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, December 27, 1983

Transcript:

This is the fourth lecture in this series on the 19th century. And this series on the 19th century, as many of you know, is embedded in a four year series that we've been working on, trying to reestablish the Chronologica Mystica – the way in which history has moved person to person rather than by political triumph or military disaster. And because of this, I have been reluctant to draw lines, ideationally, connecting the influence of the people, settling just for the bare biographies and achievements of the individuals, and leaving the implications to you yourselves through the lectures, through the cassettes, and so forth. With the tremendous interest in our subject tonight, this year being the centenary of Wagner's death, there is so much new material, and almost everywhere that I looked in the research, I found two or three volumes on almost every subject aspect. I had very little time to review most of the new material. I have for you several volumes that I think are worthwhile. One of them, just published in the last few years by Cambridge University Press, called The Wagner Companion. It's in paperback. This was published in 1979, and it is a compendium of about five hundred pages and is a very good single paperback volume. I think it sells reasonably for about $10, which is getting to be reasonable these days. The two editors are Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton.

Wagner's works are largely untranslated into English. One would like to have good English translations. The translations made early in the 20th century by a man named Ellis are just not very adequate at all. There is a very excellent translation of The Ring of the Nibelung. Andrew Porter did this in 1976, 77, and it's published in a paperback for about $6.95. And this is a tremendous volume. And if you decide that you'd like to explore Wagner – and the whole import of these lectures is to display for you the excellence and charm of all these thinkers. We have seen, for instance, so far that most of the early powerful ideas in our contemporary civilization are rooted firmly in the 19th century. And almost all of the major figures there are misunderstood. We are given pastiches instead of living traditions. We have, for instance, already discovered that the contemporary views of Karl Marx are very Marxian, but not very much in keeping with Karl Marx as a thinker. We have discovered that the origins of liberal capitalism in Jeremy Bentham are quite different from the way in which they were developed by later interpreters and second-rate thinkers like Ricardo and Mill. We discovered already, to our surprise, that in fact Herbert Spencer, who is largely portrayed as a spokesman for the British Empire and the conservative mentality of that whole genre, held great surprises for us in his intelligence and his assessment of human capacity and the way in which history and civilization have intertwined to make a tradition which is now readable as a second nature.

So it will come to no surprise to you to discover that Richard Wagner is also quite misunderstood. It is, in fact, a very difficult presentation to deliver to you. I would like to have had at least an hour's worth of musical selections for you. I was unable to do this, so I would like to give you a few hints as to what I might have used for you. I think in terms of initial experiences, one is perhaps advised to go to an orchestral selection of Wagner to tune the ear. By the ear, we also will come to understand the feelings, the emotional tone.

Those of you who were here last lecture series for the lecture on Mozart realized what a tremendous opening of human possibility. The development of Mozart's music was not so much a revolution, but a– but a complete radical reworking of the whole field of feeling. And we are having to deliver this lecture, not having done a lecture on Beethoven, who was eminently important for understanding Wagner, and the transition from Mozart to Wagner is only possible because of the genius of Beethoven. He will be presented in the lecture series on The Age of Revolution in May, June and July at the Philosophical Research Society. I had to extract certain individuals like Napoleon and Jefferson, Shelley, Goethe, Beethoven and put them into a different lecture series. Also, Schopenhauer will be in that series. We'll end the series on The Age of Revolution.

So we present Wagner tonight, not having had, in terms of actual sequence, two of the most important influences on him – the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Beethoven. We have had, three and a half years ago, a lecture on Aeschylus. And for those who are collecting the cassettes and have them available, the lecture on Aeschylus would be well to be reviewed before you listen to the Wagner lecture. Looking ahead just a little bit, Wagner, by the age of 13, had enough Greek to translate several books of the Odyssey for himself out of the Greek. This was an achievement because there was a Latin based educational system in effect at that time, and the ability to find one's way in Greek was quite unusual at this time. Homer, in fact, was quite important. A scholar named Wolf had discovered in the late 1780s, early 1790s, that by philological analysis, one could actually come to the conclusion that there was no such person as Homer, that they were collections of works. And so the controversy was beginning to rage in the intellectual world. The same thing in our time. Studies have revealed, on a complex computer philological basis that the Prometheus Bound is perhaps not by Aeschylus, but by some writer who would have lived fifty years later than he. At any rate, the point being is that Wagner was a tremendous intellect, and as even a young adolescent, was precocious enough to have pursued the study of Greek language – in this case in point – well enough to have done some translating for himself. The favorite Greek author of Wagner was Aeschylus, and in fact, the last day of his life he remarked to Kazuma that this was in fact the most important author to him that every year had revealed to him more and more potential.

When Wagner was born in 1813, in May, the world was quite different from when he died nearly seventy years later, in 1883. And we have already traced through the lecture on Marx and the lecture on Spencer, that one of the major transitions in the 19th century was in the revolutionary years, 1848 and 1849. And we will see that Wagner plays a very large role in that movement.

As a young boy, Wagner apparently was given to private musings by himself and formed very early an assessment of the world which we would call in psychology today, central version. Not so much introvert or extrovert, but blending the two realms together to make an internal bridge to the external world, and using materials from the external world to augment the internal bridging so that the centrovert is someone who is attempting to build a pattern of life for himself, and is using materials from both the inner and outer resources.

He was put in various schools. By the time he was fifteen he found himself in a school where the teaching was just repulsive. The teachers were repulsive. The way in which they handled subject matter, even which he liked, put him off, and Wagner began to seriously follow the path of self-education. This is an important point because it spared him from being ground into the academic dust which was prevalent in the early 19th century, especially for young boys who were getting a classical education. He was increasingly self-read, and when he went to school, Wagner began to lead an adventurous life. That is to say, he began participating in the kinds of adventures which a young man would have and at the same time schooling himself inside in terms of a musical orientation towards the world. By the time he was nineteen, he was already capable of writing a piece of music, such as the Symphony in C. It's been referred to by many critics as a gauche production. Nevertheless, it was written and finished. At the age of twenty, he already had written a short opera, Die Feen (The Fairies), which took mythological material, and he gave it a musical operatic Expression. This was 1833.

Wagner, seeking to find a place for himself, fell in love with an actress who was in a company. Her name was Wilhelmina or Mina. And Wagner began devoting himself to being a conductor of this third-rate traveling company. He went to several cities, including Riga, up in the areas that are now part of the Soviet Union, but were once parts of Latvia and Estonia. Königsberg was also on the agenda. For six years Wagner attempted to raise this company from a third-rate traveling troupe to a first-rate company. He began a lifelong characteristic attempt at overspending himself, borrowing and feeding funds and making ideas and making events happen until he exhausted everyone and himself – all of their funds. And I think the old saying is, one simply cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

By 1839, Wagner found himself in a dire condition and was seeking to take himself to Paris. In Paris, he heard for the first time the orchestration of Hector Berlioz, and this was a revelation to him. The sonorous texturing of Berlioz's symphonic style awakened in Wagner a tremendous musical imagination. In his mind's ear, he began to hear possibilities for music that he hadn't broached before, and by 1841 he was already at work translating one of Bulwer-Lytton's novels called Rienzi to an operatic form, and in 1842, Rienzi was actually produced in Dresden, Germany. It was a very difficult opera to put on. The lead soprano was called upon to use her voice in a way not traditional, and in correspondence to Wagner, which we still have, she laments the fact that his genius is so convoluted, and though he may have fame on the horizon for himself, his operas are very difficult to put on. They also had a mixed critical reaction. That is to say, some musical critics found Wagner absolutely stimulating. He was a new voice musically coming on the scene. There were several composers who spoke very highly of Wagner. But the mass of critics seemed to turn thumbs down on him.

Wagner had returned from the northern parts of Europe via a ship, and having spent a week or two on board ship, he got the idea for a mixture of an old sailor's story about the Flying Dutchman, and those who are acquainted with some of the stories of Wagner's operas, The Flying Dutchman is condemned to sail the seas forever, unless he can find a pure woman whose undying love for him will redeem him from his cursed condition. Every seven years he is allowed to land and go in search for his true love. Of course, in the opera, the dramatic action is always focused in Wagner. He always chooses exactly the incidents which, in their resonance, will reverberate with the needed meaning to fill out the pattern of dramatic action. In The Flying Dutchman, which was performed in Dresden in 1843, Wagner received a little less critical acclaim, but he had found a motive for writing. Something in The Flying Dutchman appealed to him.

It was the bringing together of the fantastic world of mythic possibility with the dire ethical conundrums of mortal man. And these aspects brought together occurred to Wagner to focus, much like two eyes would focus a quality of reality about human nature, which he found enticing, to say the least. Wagner's next opera was Lohengrin, and Lohengrin was produced while he was employed at the court in Dresden – from 1843 to 1849 he was employed there.

Lohengrin was widely received, but after the completion of Lohengrin, Wagner suffered a sea change in his personality due to a new perception of possibility in music. What set this up was the revolutionary tone to German society in the late 1840s. Wagner became tremendously interested in the social aspects of art. He wrote documents called Art and Revolution: The Future of the Artist, and a number of long essays which are extremely influential in European culture, especially in the German speaking world. I am not aware of any real adequate translations into English. The six or eight volume set of translations of Wagner's works by Ellis there just are not very acceptable at all. He waters Wagner down so that you don't get the tremendous terseness of ideas with the development of his prose style.

Wagner placed himself squarely on the side of revolutionary change in the 1848, 1849 demonstrations, when almost every city in Western Europe was suffering the kind of change that happened in the United States in the 1966, 67 era. Those who can throw their minds back realize the kind of turmoil socially that was happening. Wagner in this situation, he found himself on the outs with authority. And when the revolutionary thrust failed, just as Marx had to go into exile to London, Engels to London, Wagner went in exile to Zurich, Switzerland, and he took with him this brooding sensation that he was on the verge of discovering for himself a whole new way to produce an art form. That is to say, he stopped calling his work operas and began calling them musical dramas. The change is not just one in nomenclature, but one in structure, in method of composition, and in purpose. His basic outlook was that the entirety of a human sensibility should be brought into play in one art form. That drama, music, dance, costume, philosophic significance, religious aspiration all of this could be brought to play in one grand, great art form that had not been produced in Western Europe.

When he was searching for some template upon which to base himself. He rediscovered in his mind the great trilogy of Aeschylus, The Oresteia. His preoccupation with Aeschylus was the way in which religious and mythic themes were brought to play with social purposes, to produce a person, a kind of a human being, in whom all of these inter-penetrating modes would find a shimmering sense of realization. In fact, Wagner about this time began to change inside of himself. He began to discover, in the writings of Schopenhauer, the beginning indication that there were in fact ways of perceiving human nature that were transcendental in the extreme. That is to say, notions of purification and transcendence began to haunt the structural imagination of Wagner and in his questing for a method of composition, a large new art form with a structure, he hit upon the theme of making a trilogy, much like Aeschylus Oresteia, in a new art form, the musical drama. Like Aeschylus, who spoke of his own art as saying it were, it was slices from the banquet of Homer, that is to say, Aeschylus based himself on the old Homeric technique of finding the apt image, which could be described in language by a reoccurring epithet, the wine dark sea, rosy fingered dawn, and so forth. These became, in Wagner's terms, the motive, or the leaf motif and the reoccurring repetition of these leaf motifs would aid in the structural tension through the various levels of the musical drama. That is, the same leaf motif could be in the spoken verbal part, it could be in the dramatic motion, the dance part, it could be in the musical aspect. So that the transition within the overall musical drama art form would be accomplished by the running impulses of the leaf motif. Holding all of this dramatic tension would be the central protagonist.

For Wagner then at this time, he envisioned a trilogy, and in his imagination the great mythic hero Siegfried appeared to him at the moment of his death and the image not just psychologically but artistically, now, in all of its reverberations of Siegfried's death, occurred to him as the central fulcrum of the entire trilogy. But in order to achieve the comprehension of the moment in artistic terms of Siegfried's death, Wagner in his mind, in his imagination, in his composing structure, worked backwards from that indelible fulcrum of human anguish. And as he worked backwards, he realized that in order to make this moment poignant, he would have to tell the story of how Siegfried came to be. How the moment of his death came to be so poignant. How the woman who was his eternal love at the moment of his death – Brunhilde, how she came to be. And as he filled in, he realized that, in fact, he was going to have to have not a trilogy, but a trilogy with a prelude. And so we have today in the ring cycle, four operas. Although Wagner, in his structural imagination, called it a trilogy with a prelude. In fact, when one turns to the ring of the Nibelung in the very first opera, Das Rheingold, it is entitled preliminary evening to the festival play, so that the festival play ran three days, and there was a preliminary evening that also had a fourth part, which was developed and became an opera.

Now, this is interesting because the Oresteia as a surviving trilogy had a complement. The tragic Greek tragic trilogy always required a satyr play. We would call it a comic play, but when one is dealing on the level of Greek tragedy, which is a structural revelation of human propensity and not about content but about form, the comedy is not about content, but about form. And so a satyr play by Aeschylus called Proteus had accompanied the Oresteia. Unfortunately, it was lost in Roman times when these aspects were not valued so highly. So we do not have the Proteus. We have two satyr plays, one by one by Sophocles and one by Euripides. There is a translation in Penguin Classics of these two satyr plays. They also went with a trilogy. So that Das Rheingold is actually the satyr play for the trilogy of the other three operas.

So in order to write Das Rheingold, Wagner attempted to blend in composition the first two operas together. So Die Valkyrie, which was the first of the trilogy, the second of the operas, was composed roughly at the same time as Das Rheingold, and he had finished the composition of these two works in exile in Zurich – he complained bitterly about not having anyone to talk to. The only person that he was close to at this time was Franz Liszt. Liszt had in fact, in 1850 sent letters all over Europe inviting every one he could think of, of importance in the musical world, and put on a performance of Lohengrin that astonished Europe. Wagner himself did not hear Lohengrin until eleven years later. He complained in a letter to someone, he said, “Everyone in Europe has heard my opera except myself.” So he was in exile in Zurich, in Switzerland. The German authorities did not like this well-spoken, powerful, dynamic revolutionary in their midst. So he was exiled. He was banned. He would be recalled by Ludwig the Second, the wonderful Mad King, some fifteen years later. We haven't got to that.

In exile, struggling with an art form that was to be new, basing himself on the old Greek Oresteia patterns. Struggling within himself with a spiritual vision that began to mature and as it matured, produced in Wagner a sea change in his personality. The core of the change came after he finished writing Die Valkyrie and as he began writing Siegfried. Now Siegfried's death had been the core fulcrum image, the archetypal emergent point at which Wagner's imagination had struggled with the whole composition problem in the first place. As soon as he got to starting the writing of Siegfried, the third opera in the ring, the second opera in the trilogy, the poignancy of certain observations of Schopenhauer penetrated to him, and it was not so much Schopenhauer's Upanishadic leanings, you know in encyclopedias, they call it pessimism. Anything that isn't for filling the stomach is pessimism. The Encyclopedia Britannica refers to this kind of a philosophy as pessimistic. It's not so at all. Anyone acquainted with the eastern yogic or Buddhist or Taoist thought can see that what was being introduced here was the idea of world negation in terms of a passionate involvement towards a transcendent emergence into a compassionate involvement. So what became for Wagner crucial was the relation of eros to agape.

This is an extremely difficult subject area to talk about. I brought a book by Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, which you can take a look at later, and you can inform yourself just by paging through it, of the tremendous importance and strenuousness of this differentiation. In Wagner's spirit – and we have to talk now of his spirit and not of his mind – in Wagner's spirit he was making all of these transitions at the same time. And the difference is noticeable, if you will, just play for yourself two pieces, two selections, of music. If you play for yourself, The Ride of the Valkyries and then play for yourself, Forest Murmurs from Siegfried, one after the other, you will notice a tremendous change in musical imagination.

But music for Wagner had become integrated into a larger art form, so that if one takes the opera Die Valkyrie and compares it to the opera Siegfried, one finds a tremendous transition has happened here. In fact, Wagner, on the verge of making a tremendous radical discovery that his own nature was so wrought with the anxiety of creation, with the verging discovery. That he set aside work on the ring and began to compose a very light hearted piece. And this opera is called the Mastersingers of Nuremberg. And if you will play for yourself the overture to the Mastersingers of Nuremberg, you will find a tremendous buoyancy. In fact, it is the buoyancy that the cadence of the Odyssey is written in. There is a wonderful book called The Sound of Greek by W. B. Stanford, and in the back of the book, published by University of California Press, Sather Classical Lectures, sometime in the 1960s, or early 60s. W. B. Stanford, an old Irish sage, did his best to reestablish the Homeric hexameter cadences, and on this little record in the back you will find selections of classical Greek reconstructed to the best of our ability. If you listen to the selection of the way in which the cadences of the Odyssey run and then listen to the overture of the Meistersinger of Nuremberg, you will detect the similarity. If you progress with Stanford's work and listen to the way in which the cadence of the Iliad is written, you will hear this cadence in Siegfried, especially in the funeral march. And Siegfried's funeral march is one of the great dramatic musical experiences of the Western world. It presents not the dirge of the final ending in the funeral march, but the expectant cadence of someone leaping from the illusory to the real. And it is this quest for dissolving illusion and projecting the real that became essential to Wagner's mind. And in trying to create an art form to express this, he settled upon musical and verbal and dramatic interpenetration in his musical drama – is the way in which to carry this off.

When he finished the Meistersinger and incidentally, the Meistersinger is a tremendous plot in itself historically. In the late 12th century, early 13th century, there was in fact a very powerful German poet Walther von der Vogelweide, who was from the Tyrol era of Germany and was one of the very early poets who opted for using the German language in place of Latin, who opted for having an independent German spirit as against the kind of overwhelming papacy edict structure that was in religion. So Walter von Vogelweide is represented in the Meistersingers of Nuremberg. And in fact Wagner lovers had made sure that a statue to him was raised in 1877 in his home region. Monies were made available from one of the Beirut concerts.

The Meister singers in the opera are twelve in number, and in fact they are historical figures who lived at this time. And their basic consideration was that there were definite rules to be followed in the art of singing, and that flaws in singing should be pointed out, and those who carried flaws into the musical structure should be exempted from participating in the concerts of the Meister singers. The reason for this being is the sacredness of the art was an exacting spiritual experience that needed to be carried through for the good of the people, that their independence as political subjects, their health as social personages, their ability to function as human beings was all dependent upon the purity of the language, the beauty of the singing. And you can see this fit in tremendously with the way in which Wagner was struggling mightily during the 1850s in exile to bring all these problems together and find an expressive form, to float every one of the problems and bring them to an integration, dissolving the erotic and projecting the Agape became for him the breaking point of human reality. And when he finished the Meistersingers, he couldn't go on with Siegfried, he was seized with the vision of the old classical work from the Middle Ages about Tristan and Isolde. And so Wagner, from 1856 to 1859, poured himself into one of the great works of the human spirit. And when he finished Tristan and Isolde, he despaired of it ever being performed, because it required of the singers a level of professionalism that simply was not available in Europe at that time. It required a sense of orchestration and conducting that simply was not available. He produced, in other words, if we can use the term, opera, we better use musical drama. Work of art. He produced a work of art that transcended the capacity of the time to produce Wagner at this time. Had found himself increasingly estranged from his wife, Wilhelmina. He found himself involved in an infatuation with a woman named Mathilde. He found himself suddenly, at the age of 51, penniless, without friends. Without much hope of going on. And then a miracle happened.

When Liszt had performed. Lohengrin. In the audience was the young sixteen year old man who would become King Ludwig II of Bavaria. And when he ascended to the throne in Bavaria, he realized that his hero Wagner was languishing. This great musical genius. Ludwig had as an adolescent, had had built for him a huge pond where he would dress up as the Swan Knight, Lohengrin, and he would have mechanical swans pull his boat across this pond, and he would try his best to sing some of the arias from Lohengrin. And when he realized that Wagner was in terrible straits, he sent his personal secretary with a brief message, “come and finish your work.” And in it was a promise of a stipend. And Wagner accepted.

And so Wagner came back out of exile and went to Munich. And for the next long while, King Ludwig the Second was his patron. Wagner then was able to return to the problem that he had set aside. He had despaired of ever being able to complete the ring. Now he returned, he had finished Tristan and Isolde. He had finished the Mastersingers of Nuremberg. He had finished long since the first two operas in the ring. Now he set himself to Siegfried. When we listen. To Siegfried, we must also listen to the fourth opera, Götterdammerung, at the same time. That is to say, those two operas were composed together, just as the first two, Die Valkyrie and Das Rheingold, had been produced together. So that actually the ring cycle is produced in pairs, Errors almost in resonant pairs. When we listen to the first murmurings of Sigfried and then Siegfried's funeral march, we notice a tremendous élan building. The élan is one of moving from the natural realm in the forest murmurings. One has the sense, almost of a work even more delightful than Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, the Sixth Symphony. Tremendous vistas of the natural world open up, but the natural world is carved up by man, not so much by man, but by a mythological map incised into man's heritage so deeply that it is unconscious in man. In the ring cycle. It is simply disclosed that the gods have long since played a complicated game, and that the hero Siegfried is actually the grandson of Wotan, and that in fact, Wotan has played a tremendous, risky game and has come up on the short side of reality. Even for the gods, he is doomed and all Valhalla are doomed.

Wotan, whose power in the ring cycle is inherent in his spear and on his spear, which is made out of the world ash, the world tree are engraved magical ruins, and these ruins spell the chant of Power of Wotan, Time, which in his involvement in the world, his spear is like the magical wand of magical charm. And what it stirs up is the world of erotic involvement. Siegfried, who is his grandson. His father died defending his mother, who was also his sister, and his mother died, leaving him in charge of a dwarf named mime. And mime was the brother of another dwarf, Alberich, and it was this dwarf that originally had taken the gold of the Rhine maidens and had fashioned a secret ring and had fashioned a helmet, a golden helmet, which, when put on, would allow one to change shape, become invisible. The ring itself was a– was a ring of power. The ring is not only a ring for fingers. The ring is the measuring diameter of Wotan's spear, and it is a ring of power. Because it is able to play out the language of the magical world incantation and all of its erotic development, so that the ring is the key. The calipers to the world of phenomenal complication. And all of the gods have always looked to the world of phenomenal things. Wotan has always been entranced with playing with the ladies, with involving the gods, with men, and this is how the complications have come out.

But Wagner, inside of– inside of himself, in possession of a new vision of man, a vision of purity and transcendence, where passion becomes compassion, where this world is illusion and should be rejected and dissolved, so that man may free himself from its complications, may learn to purify himself through the flames of the erotic involvement conjured up by the magic of the gods, so that the ultimate solving of man's problems is actually the dissolving of the whole pantheon of his gods. It is the gods who must go for man to be liberated. And so, Siegfried, part man, part God, the hero for whom fear has no meaning, who in his naivete has never experienced Fear. He has a pet bear that he walks around on a chain. He wants a sword fashioned so that he can go out and have knightly adventures. And every time mime the Nibelung dwarf fashions a sword, Siegfried shatters it on the anvil, and then, sensing in his boisterous, boyish power and facility and naivete that the Nibelung has lied to him about his heritage, finally forces out of him the fact of who his mother was, who his father was, and that his mother had saved the shattered sword of her brother-husband, which had been shattered, not slaying a foe, but by Wotan coming in and putting his spear in to shatter the blade.

Involving himself yet again in the affairs of man. Changing history. Changing involvement. And so the shards are left there. Mime, the brother of the maker of the ring cannot put this sword back together. So, Siegfried, in his naivete, in his devotion to transcendental capacity. Fills the shattered pieces of metal. And under direction of Mime, learns how to anneal it and put it together. And he makes the sword again. No thumb which is able to shatter. The anvil cut it in two is what happens on stage. Then he holds this up in the image of holding it up. In Wagner's musical imagination. In his religious symbolism. Is that what Siegfried holds up is not so much just a sword out of uncanny steel, but is a bolt of lightning. It is pure light, refined into energy before it has become form, so that. Siegfried wields energy primordial before it has involved itself in the phenomenal world. He is of that ilk. He recovers the ring and the helmet. And in the adventure of doing this in Das Gotterdammerung (The Twilight of the Gods), he becomes involved with a humming lesson to himself before he is able to slay the dragon, which was a giant named Fafnir who had transformed himself into a dragon. He is biding his time in front of this cave mouth and he is contemplating his sword, its capacity, his capacity. And he notices, because he is naturally alert, that he hears the bird singing, but cannot understand the bird songs. And this is where the theme of the Meistersingers comes back in. This is where the theme of Wagner's own capacity comes back in. He wonders why he cannot understand the birds songs. After he kills the dragon and returns with the ring and the helmet, he is able to understand the birds, and the birds tell him – now that he can understand their language – that this is an accursed ring, that the whole involvement with the phenomenal realm, with gods and men and magic and things, has produced an insoluble tangle that no matter what happens, it will go on unless the entire entourage of events is ended.

Siegfried, then, as the real hero, is told by one of the birds that there is a woman for him who is important to his destiny. She was once a Valkyrie. Her name is Brunhilde, and the Valkyrie are– were eight daughters of Wotan and the earth goddess Erda. And these eight sisters would ride down into battle and would take the dead bodies of the slain warriors and take them up to Valhalla, and they would be magically brought back to life, sort of like magical zombies in a way. And there in Valhalla, they would constantly hone their killing Instincts by slaying each other, and then their wounds would be magically healed. And all of this was to build up an army for Wotan to protect himself.

In other words, he was incorporating the phenomenal world more and more into the realm of the gods to force him to fortify himself against his prophesied demise. And all the while, the hair trigger on the entire events was bound up in his grandson Siegfried, who had recovered the sword, the lightning energy, and the courage to use it. And Wotan and Götterdammerung in The Twilight of the Gods does not appear as Wotan, but in disguise as the Wanderer. Somewhat of a mendicant hooded figure. Capable of telling riddles. Capable of– of going to all the different aspects of all the different actors in the musical drama. Trying to keep track and control of it. But when he pulls his world ash spear out to save himself against this vengeant grandson, his spear is cut up and shattered by the lightning transcendental energy of Siegfried in his purity. And Wotan flees back to Valhalla and realizes that his day is done, that is, the twilight of the gods, and the shattered remnants of the World Tree that had been fashioned into a spear with magical runes to allow him to have a magic wand of war and power and Eros to stir up the phenomenal Nominal world are now the fagots to act as the sticks that will burn him in his final pyre. Siegfried has rescued Brunhilde from a circle, a wicket of flames, one of the valkyries, and she, falling deeply in love with Siegfried, tells him that she will wait for him because she knows that he has an adventure he has to go to. He goes off on his adventure, and in his adventure he has administered a potion, a magic potion by a woman, and he forgets about Brunhilde, becomes involved with her. And the upshot in The Twilight of the Gods is that Siegfried is killed. Brunhilde, realizing too late that he had been given a potion, that it was the last complication of the magical god realm in human affairs. Decides to join him in death on the funeral pyre. And as Wotan burns in Valhalla, Siegfried and Brunhilde burn in the phenomenal realm, and the entire complication of the realm of the gods and Eros goes up in flames. All of this was produced at a theater specially built for it in Beirut, a little town in Germany. They built the theater especially to produce the Ring.

I don't have time to go into all the biographical details of Wagner. He had fallen in love with Cosima, who was Franz Liszt daughter. She was married to Hans von Bülow, who was the conductor of the Ring cycle, one of the first really great Wagner conductors. She and Wagner were eventually married and they had three children. One of them was named Siegfried. Wagner became a spectacular cultural hero, not only for the German race, but for the entire European psyche for the 19th century. Wagner became what Tolstoy would become near the end of his life – he became the most famous man in Europe. Towards the end of his life, Wagner, realizing the tremendous capacity which he had engendered, devoted himself to a theme which he had thought of as an adolescent, and now came back up the great poem of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. And Wagner devoted the last couple of years of his life to producing one of the really great transcendent works of the human spirit, a work that belongs like Beethoven's Ninth to any civilized person in any era of the world's history.

In the Parzival, if one would only play for oneself the difference between the overture to the Parzival and the overture to say something like Lohengrin, you will find for yourself a tremendous jump in capacity, a difference in intent. There is a transition, though, and the transition is identifiable in this way. If one goes to Tristan and Isolde, to the poignant liebestod the love death theme, and play that and then play the overture to Parzival immediately after it, one sees the transition from Tristan and Isolde with the poignancy of love, death, eros, phenomenal death and the way in which Parzival lifts cleanly off the map of the phenomenal world, as if it were just an illusion, and flies in the melodic line into the dramatic structure of the Parzival. So that Parzival as a work becomes more and more a shimmering sheen of abstract movements that finally take the experience of the listener away from himself, herself as a phenomenal body, and pasts us into an eternal realm.

It was said at one time of the Parzival, in the introduction by Gruber, written in 1896, “This opera, which Wagner himself called a religious drama, is intended as the Song of Songs of Divine Love, as Tristan and Isolde is the song of songs of Terrestrial Love. The performance was repeated sixteen times at Beirut, where many people had come from all parts of the world to hear and see it, and has since been revived a number of times. It is the most difficult and least easily understood of the master's intricate works, and bears the imprint not only of his philosophic studies, but also of the spirit of Oriental mysticism in which he delighted, in which he at one time intended to make use for the stage. In fact, the theme of the Holy Grail became, for Wagner, the last work for the phenomenal realm that he would write. He projected a Buddhist musical drama called The Victors, but left only the sketches. He died months after Parzival was staged, and did not live to complete what would have been the sequel to it: a Buddhist musical drama called The Victors.

Well, you're beginning to see that the subtitle of the course, A Journey into the Permanently Dissolving Reality, is a very apt way of describing the 19th century. I think that's all for tonight.